Eating Dark Chocolate Daily Can Slim You Down

It might sound a bit too good to be true, but a new study has found that people who eat dark chocolatemore frequently tend to be thinner than those who consume the sweet treat less often. The findings suggest that the health benefits of chocolate may be linked to how many times in a given week it is eaten, instead of the total amount consumed in that week.

Eating Dark Chocolate Can Help You Lose Weight

This is according to the study’s lead researcher, Beatrice Golomb,
an associate professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. Eating a small amount of dark chocolate for five days during a week was linked to a lower BMI, even when the person ate more calories overall and did not exercise more than the other participants.

Dr. Golomb said that their findings appear to add to a body of information suggesting that the composition of calories, and not just the number of them, matters in determining their ultimate impact on an individual’s weight. The findings were published as a research letter in Monday’s Archives of Internal Medicine. Dr. Golomb said that the weight different among more frequent eaters of healthy chocolate was modest but interesting, given that more calories and saturated fat are consumed. Dark chocolate contains fat in the form of stearic acid.

Dark Chocolate Can Help With Cholesterol And Blood Pressure

Other research has shown the health benefits of chocolate, which include a modest reduction in cholesterol and blood pressure. Dr. Golomb explains that it contains antioxidants like epicatechin which has shown in other researches to boost the energy-producing elements of the cells of the body. However, past findings from the current study point to a downside from eating chocolate. People who ate more of it were more likely to be depressed.

The participants of the study, on average, ate chocolate two times a week and exercised for 3.6 times a week. Their average age was 57 and almost 70% of them were men. They have an average body mass index (BMI) of 28 which is considered overweight. The adults in the chocolate study were initially screened for separate research on cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Nutritional Lauren Graf from Montefiore Medical Center in Bronx, New York, said that a person, who is going to eat chocolate, should go with a daily dose of dark chocolate. Dark chocolate has been found to have a higher concentration of antioxidants than milk chocolate, and tends to have less sugar. Many nutritionists and doctors suggest sticking to about an ounce of chocolate a day, which is less than a regular-size chocolate bar. For example, a 1.44-ounce sized bar of Dove dark chocolate contains 220 calories with 120 of those calories coming from fat, according to the label.

Eat 1 Ounce Of Dark Chocolate A Day

To determine if dark chocolate really does have a positive impact on weight, a study specifically designed to compare chocolate eaters to non-chocolate eaters should be conducted, said Dr. Golomb. This has a stumbling block, however, which is coming up with a fake dark chocolate placebo that appears like the real thing.